Syncretistic Catholicism

another minority report

Syncretistic Catholicism where any Anglican, Episcopal, Roman &

Orthodox consensus informs core beliefs & divergences are
received as valid theological opinions

Beyond the Sophianic to the Neo-

Chalcedonian – actually, it’s good
Beyond the Sophianic to the Neo-Chalcedonian – or how
haecceities & energies can help provide us a more robust account
for actuality of the divine essence

I don’t invoke a Neo-Chalcedonian hypostatic identity to overcome

lingering aporetic, antinomial or paradoxical Chalcedonian
“problems” with reconciling natural incompatibilities. I already
accept that they’re ex Deo – compatible & in an harmonious
sophianic relationship.

The question isn’t about reconciling natures in an hypostasis.

What we’re asking, rather, are questions like:
How should we define our self-identities?

What sources our distinct hypostatic othernesses?

What makes the Many different from the One such that emanation
doesn’t lead back to a divisible monism?

How do we account for our personal differences along with our

constitutive identity?

The work being done by any concept of hypostatic relational

power has to do with answering such intersubjective questions,
above, and not with explaining natural (sophianic – ex Deo)
unions, in other words with hypostatic – not natural, but –
personal unions.

These are not questions regarding our natures but about the
nonformal aspects of our personhood, what Peirce called brute
actualities, Scotus – haecceities, trinitarians – ineffable idiomata,
etc

These realities affirm the divine omnipresencing of creation’s

shadows & vestiges and the mutual indwellings of its images &
likenesses.

Ontological participation, alone, might account for how creation’s

omnipresenced shadows & vestiges come about determinedly, but
it doesn’t address how it’s images can self-determinedly become
likenesses. We aren’t mere passive participants. We are acting co-
creators. Clarke defines self-identity as “the active power of self-
maintenance in exchange with others.”
We are active powers, brute actualities or personal haecceities,
whose distinct concrete acts, when free & intelligent, are peculiar
personal expressions of the power to love.

We commence our journeys relatively perfect & good. We

synergistically grow our hypostatic identities through deification.

Using Damascene’s distinctions between the operative, operating,

operator & operated may be helpful here. We can map them to,
respectively, essences, energeia, entities (personal & social) &
effects. As operators, we, as personal entities, employ our co-
creative power to concretely express & exercise what’s operative
per our essence. Essentially, our will is our most proper & primary
property.

So, again, how should we define our self-identities? What sources

our distinct hypostatic othernesses? What makes the Many
different from the One such that emanation doesn’t lead back to a
divisible monism? How do we account for our personal
differences along with our constitutive identity?

The answer to those questions is our “creaturely freedom,” which

is nothing other than our “power to love.” Such an emanation, then,
can only lead to a multiplicative monism (not a supraindividual
being but an intersubjective doing).

Enhypostasization, then, doesn’t just refer to how persons

accommodate differences in nature, participatorily & ontologically,
but it accounts for our hypostatic identities, perichoretically &
personally, corporately & constitutively, which is to say, reciprocally
& theophanically, vis a vis the Totus Christus (hence,
Christogonically per Christ’s esse secundum).

This is all to recognize that, while our natural participation in divine

perfections will only ever be relative, i.e. none of us will ever be
omniscient (truth), omnipathic (beauty), omnibenevolent
(goodness), omnipresent (being), omnipotent (freedom) or
omniunitive (unity), still, constitutively, per both our acts & relations
(operations & identities), there is a certain hypostatic symmetry in
that, as Christ became human in all ways but sin, we’re eternally
becoming divine in no way but love. That’s to recognize that, like
Christ, we don’t deem equality with God, in those natural aspects,
anything to be grasped after. While Christ, in no measure, ever
ontologically negated any attribute of His divine nature, He did
operationally occult some – when it would advance His loving
aims, which are never ultimately frustratable.

Above all else, then, He & the Holy Spirit chose to manifest the
Father’s love, while inviting & empowering us to do the same – not
just bilaterally, but – symmetrically, which is to say, via a noetic
identity & an energetic co-operation that will gift us the same
enjoyment experienced by the Trinity in their own perichoretic
unity! To be clear, this will amount to a quidditative knowledge –
though not comprehension – of the divine essence in the beatific
vision, which can grow epectatically & eternally.

This is to finally suggest that hypostatic logics, including

haecceities & energies, do not entail mere ad hoc strategies to
deal with natural differences between nondeterminate &
determinate being. Peirce, Scotus & others fruitfully (heuristically
not explicatively) employ these categories, philosophically, in their
metaphysics of determinate being. They help us locate instances
in nature where free choices have entered the scene & influenced
probabilistic outcomes!

To wit, consider Fr Christiaan Kappes’ account of the causal role

of things that seem to flow out of the identity of the being’s
haecceity:
Aristotle’s standard account of accidents (as repeated and adopted
by Aquinas) is not relevant for Scotus’ analysis of divine attributes.
Duns’ way of looking at things seems to assume that accidents
(attributes) don’t have to inhere in matter. Matter is an entity, not
just Aquinas’ (objective) potentiality. It may have a relationship with
forms, but accidents are really active attributes within a being (i.e.
energies). They seem to flow out of the identity of the being’s
individuating perfection (haecceity), and as such aren’t the types of
things that just inhere. They actually have a causal role in nature,
and as such are another rich instance of interplay among
themselves. God’s energies, in parallel fashion, are simply
necessary to give a full account of the actuality of divine essence.

re: metaphors of incandescence & whether or not & how they

might qualify the mystical claim that concepts fade entirely

Let me begin with my ending:

I especially thought of Tom Belt and Fr. Behr, when I first came
across this:

[W]ith Maximus, Bonaventure turns the Dionysian apophatic to a

Christological proclamation. … If you seek the Dionysian
“superessential ray of the divine darkness,” he suggests, you are
entering the silent darkness of death with Christ crucified.
~ Paul Rorem, Negative Theologies and the Cross, Cambridge
University Press:  01 October 2008

Now, let me start at the beginning:

Lossky was on the right track in conceiving some mystical
experiences in terms of ineffability within an apophatic,
perichoretic context, i.e. as a transrational relational reference (not
a metaphysical description).

This is how some interpret certain nonduality teachings in

Buddhist & Hindu traditions, i.e. as not doing metaphysics but as
leading one into experiences or real-izations.

Staniloae went further with more rigor & nuance than Lossky. He
referred to ineffable experiences as – not only transrational, but –
trans-apophatic. While he certainly included 1) logocentric
negations, speculatively; 2) transrational ineffability, experientially;
and 3) divine encounters that go beyond – not only the inferential
& intuitive, but – even the affective;

Staniloae, by trans-apophatic, drew a perichoretic distinction that

recognized how we also inter-ACT with God in a synergy.

Synergistically, then, we, as operators (Damascene), come to

operatively know, better & better, the Author of such works
(Bradshaw), while, at the same time, becoming more & more
authentically ourselves via deification (Cappadocian).

And this brings us full circle back to Maximus, Bonaventure, Fr

Behr & Tom Belt.

Don’t these excerpts, below, from Rorem’s article, tie-together our

insights re both certain mystical claims & the role of death in
theosis? Even Bonaventure went beyond – not only the
conceptual, but – the affective to the operative, describing it,
Christo-logically, in a most definitive way, i.e. death’s our final
theotic threshold?
I wonder, ergo, if the light & air and fire & iron metaphors, which
capture the various harmonious natural differences of
asymmetric ontological participations might be less apt for the
interpersonal perichoretic dynamics of theosis & the beatific vision?

It’s not naturally & asymmetrically (re operative essences) but

hypostatically & symmetrically (re both acts or operations as well
as relations or identities) that we’ll beatifically enjoy &
theophanically manifest the very same perichoretic delights in
the divine essence as do the persons of the Trinity?

Furthermore, even regarding the natural differences of divine &

human essences, we can more precisely locate those
asymmetries, modally, in our tropoi, which are modally finite, and
not in the divine logoi of our divine perfections, which are modally
relative.

So, the analogy of being affirms a symmetry vis a vis divine

humanization & human divinization in terms of participable logoi
(perfections) ex Deo as well as in terms of perichoretic acts
(operations) and relations (identity), while recognizing a modal
asymmetry vis a vis both the intensities of our beatitude, which
can vary, even, person to person, as well as the scopes of our
theophanic manifestations, which we co-self-determine via our
autonomous soul-crafting.

Because all of those above-listed particular eschatological

properties are thus imparted symmetrically (via both a synergy of
energeia & noetic identity, constitutively, as well as essentially, via
logoi & perfections), the classic Stoic example of the mixing of
wine with water might be a suitable metaphor for deification with
its reciprocal divine – human loving dispositions of personal unity
(involving bilateral interpenetrations), all ordered toward the
intersubjective unity of doing of the Totus Christus.
By the mystery of this water and wine may we come to share in
the divinity of Christ who humbled himself to share in our
humanity.

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John Sobert Sylvest August 22, 2023 Uncategorized